Each spring, world-language teacher Lori LeVar Pierce’s work takes her out of the classroom and into the gladiator ring. There, after months of studying Latin, her students take on a different side of ancient culture while competing at the Junior Classical League Convention, participating in gladiator fights, footraces, javelin throws, and even a student-built chariot race. “It’s a lot of fun to act like the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks,” Pierce says.
Pierce’s students are Latin champions on the National Latin Exam. This past year, they took more gold and silver medals than any group of Latin students at the school in its history. But when Pierce was first offered her position at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science back in 2010, Latin was all Greek to her.
After Pierce graduated with her MBA from BYU in 1992, she worked for several years in market research, including as a director of marketing research for UPS, before taking time off to be at home with her children. But when she tried to find work near her new home in Mississippi several years later, there were no corporate headquarters nearby—so she decided to use her BYU undergraduate degree in French with a minor in German to land a teaching job.
Learning a new language in her forties was a challenge. She spent eighteen months teaching herself Latin while teaching French and German in the classroom. Pierce started by reviewing vocabulary in college textbooks; she then took an independent study class, followed by a directed independent study course with a Latin professor at a local university, spending a couple hours a week with him until she felt ready to teach.
“I’ll be the first to say it isn’t easy to learn a foreign language,” Pierce says. “I struggled through them when I was in school, but I must have crossed over some threshold that has made it all start to click in my brain.”
For the past year, Pierce has served on the committee that revised world language teaching standards for the state of Mississippi. This February, Pierce was one of only twenty teachers selected for a three-week summer program in Leipzig, Germany, to develop science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum.
She still uses her business training while sponsoring her school’s Future Business Leaders of America chapter. She also serves as the president of the Mississippi chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German and as a board member for the Columbus Choral Society. She and her husband, Daniel, have three children.
When asked whether she enjoys teaching or market research more, Pierce says, “It’s the same kind of question as when people ask me which of my languages I prefer—I love them all the same.”
